Is It Time to Shut Up?

The well is dry

Just a little bird, painted on rice paper in a Japanese house

Friends, I’ve been stressing about this newsletter. What do I write to all you good people who dedicate a chunk of your precious time to read whatever it is I choose to share here each month?

My goal is to inspire, remind, provoke and encourage you. Inviting creativity and curiosity into our lives makes them so much better. But that’s hard to do that when you’re feeling uninspired.

Nothing in the past few weeks has moved me enough to base an entire letter on it. Does that mean it’s time for me to shut up?

What’s going on

I cannot lie, my well is dry as a bone frying in the desert sun (to mix metaphors). I’ve been running productivity workshops and cheering on my students when I myself am not writing.

Not writing should be okay. But creatives create and when we don’t, it’s the pits.

I’m like one of those “road trains” that chug across the epic flats of Australia. Slow and steady. Hard to stop once they get going, hard to start up again once they stop — momentum is everything, after all. And God forbid they have to TURN!

I’d love to be an agile writer but the truth is, I’m not. My first book came out in 2008 — sixteen years ago — yet the vagaries of the industry still get to me. Add to that the insanity of world events and I want to retreat into a cave and stop all the talking and proselytizing forevermore.

But I can’t do that. Part of my job — actually, the part that I find the most fun (except for writing, at least when it’s going well) — is to encourage you do your best, to stay curious, keep going, pay attention, hold yourselves to high standards while also allowing yourself some grace.

So… am I following my own advice?

What I’m not doing

• Reading or watching the news

• Complaining (at least, I’m trying not to)

• Doom scrolling

• Quitting

While not writing, I’ve been focussing on a few key efforts in an attempt to re-energize.

Leaning on community

Thank you, readers, for being part of my team. It means a lot to me to know that you keep opening my letters and finding something of value in them.

Despite not being sure what I’ll be working on, I accepted an eight-day residency this coming February. There will be nine highly accomplished writers on this retreat along with me. My participation feels scary but necessary. Sure hope I’m out of my rut by then and feel like talking again.

Stepping out of your ordinary life in order to immerse yourself in writing is an incredible gift… unless you’re not writing.

I once went on a two week residency in Provincetown during which I wrote 500 words. I don’t need to tell you what a misery that was. (Although I did sleep in Norman Mailer’s bedroom and while that was super weird, it’s been grist for the mill ever since.)

Also, I’m in a new writers group in Key West. Two writer friends rent offices in a tiny, decrepit conch house — with its original, dusty MCM furnishings and a kitchenette from the 40s — where four of us meet to talk writing and read from our works-in-progress. I’m not sure why, but I get huge pleasure from the fact that this little house exists, unimproved, and that I get to go there to seek inspiration and community.

Not the actual house, but close…

It’s been almost twenty years since I consistently workshopped my pages with other writers. Truth is, I like my writing to be GOOD before I show it to anyone! But I’m working hard on loosening up and finding ways to make writing more fun. We’re an eclectic bunch — different ages, publishing paths and personalities — and it’s going to be great to get out of my shell.

Blasting music

The day after the election, I asked my father what his favorite piano piece is and I’ve been playing it on repeat since then: Schubert’s Piano Sonata No 21 D 960.

This song also works for me: "Got It Bad" by Leisure.

Got our different ways with the same old payout
Had our own dreams with the same old outcome
Had it to extreme and the same old break down
Worked it to the bone with the same old habit

Once we recognize our bad habits, we can work on changing them. I’ve got to stop doing the same things and expecting different outcomes. While I know this, it’s not easy to do and this song reminds me of that age old lesson.

Narrowing the scope

I’ve turned inwards toward home and hearth. Right now, nothing feels better than fixing something that’s badly broken or damaged… or even just scruffy.

We’re restoring the roof of an old Japanese house in the Catskills in which pretty much everything was broken, overgrown, neglected, dirty and at risk of being forever lost. This is a huge project which I started three years ago, but at this particular moment in time it is giving me immense joy to put effort and money into repairs.

Take a close look at the first few images below. These are massive beams, cut in the early 1900s, that were smashed in a devastating storm eight years ago. The Japanese joinery is astonishing.

I’m also getting great pleasure trying to put these puzzle pieces together in a way that honors the original. We’ll be encasing the pillars and tacking up the old, carved (broken and glued) planks on top of the new beams in an effort to come close to how it used to be.

Smaller fix it projects can also do the trick. Is there something in your home that you can spruce up, paint, clean or fix? Back in Key West, I repainted our deck. It’s already dirty (iguana poop and fallen coconuts which stain the wood), but the task itself got me out of my own head for a day.

Focusing on a new mantra

Be bold! This is my new intention when I do yoga. I’m busy seeking activities that encourage me to be bold.

Last week when I finished reading The Glass Room by Simon Mawer, a New York Times bestseller from about fifteen years ago, ideas for my next novel immediately began popping into my head. Why not write in multiple shifting points of view? Why not allow the narrative of my next novel to be a little more fluid, a little less rigid? The Glass Room tells the story of a radically modernist structure built in Czechoslovakia in the 1920s, and follows the various occupants of the house through the tumultuous decades that followed.

And though I never would have guessed it, the Martha Stewart documentary gave me a shot of energy — she’s assertive, daring, persistent and unimaginably successful. She had a vision and stuck with it. The documentary about her career is fascinating (and here’s a NYT article about how much she hated it; I find her disdain quite amusing).

That woman picked herself up and dusted herself off more times than you can imagine. I don’t think I’d like her all that much, but I certainly admire her confidence and tenacity.

I’d love some feedback - will you indulge me?